BMW's '100 Days To Go' Celebrations

This week we helped BMW celebrate the fact there's just 100 Days To Go until the Olympics. And how did they decide to celebrate? By attempting to generate enough electricity through pedal-power to drive a BMW ActiveE electric car around the London 2012 marathon course. Nutters! We were pretty excited to get to use the BMW bikes for a really slick pedal-power set-up.

Over one hundred members of staff across 11 departments competed to win tickets for the Olympic Games by generating the most power. The Hockey playing Mantell brothers even came down to help them with their challenge!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUZra5DRqo]

We worked with our friends at Firefly Solar to manage the power from the 15 bikes by feeding the energy generated by the bikes into a solar battery. We used our YouWatt software projected onto screens around the room to give the participants an idea of how much energy they were generating as they pedaled. Some of the larger, speedier teams managed to keep their power levels at around 995 watts and occasionally even tipped the balance to over a kilowatt of power.

Each department was competing to win tickets for the Olympics and this incentive certainly seemed to bring out their competitive natures! Not every department had the same number of people so we decided to keep a record of the watt hours generated per person during the session and the distance they individually managed to power the BMWActiveE for. The winning team of the day had only four members compared to the larger departments who had up to 15 cyclists and the individual cyclists in the winning team managed to power the car a whopping 125 metres each!

The overall challenge of the day was to generate enough power to get the car around the 42km marathon track and they managed just half of that. It was a great day though with everyone putting in their all and it was all finished off nicely with a tasty BMW cup cake.